Large Hadron Collider teams find new three exotic particles

The Large Hadron Collider beauty (LHCb) team discovered three new kinds of exotic particles: a pentaquark, double-charged tetraquark, and neutral tetraquark.

Image: Cern

The pentaquark is made up of a charm quark, anti charm quark, an up, a down, and a strange quark. The pentaquark has been observed before but this is the first pentaquark that contains a strange quark. The doubly electrically charged tetraquark consists of a charm, a strange antiquark, an up quark, and a down antiquark, and the third one is its neutral counterpart of the doubly electrically charged.

Quarks are fundamental particles that made up matter. All the matter around is made up of protons and neutrons and all of these are composed of quarks. They come in six flavors: up, down, charm, strange, top, and bottom. The proton is composed of two up quarks and one down quark, while neutrons contain two down quarks and an up quark. Any particles that consist of quarks and experience strong nuclear force are called Hadrons. The particles that contain more than three quarks are called exotic hadrons.

Image: Wikipedia

The newly discovered particles were added to the growing list of Hadrons found at the LHC. So far, the LHC has found 66 hadrons. Chris Parkes, an LHCb spokesperson, said “Finding new kinds of tetraquarks and pentaquarks and measuring their properties will help theorists develop a unified model of exotic hadrons, the exact nature of which is largely unknown.”

Quantum Chromodynamics, the theory of strong interaction, was developed around Hadron states' existence at that time which is Hadron states with two or three quarks. But the theory didn’t exclude the possibility of exotic hadrons. The new exotic states are not fully understood yet but discovering more such exotic hadrons will help in refining the theory.

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References:

1. https://home.cern/news/news/physics/lhcb-discovers-three-new-exotic-particles
2. https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1674-1137/40/4/042001/pdf